Installment from "The Bowling Ball in the Freezer and Other Secrets of a Highly Efficient You." Copyright 2008, all rights reserved.
These two are my favorite clients. I’ve worked with them both for a number of years. I’ve helped them achieve professional goals, reach undreamed of emotional fulfillment, and evade the police when necessary.
In this book, I’m going to give you a look inside the heads of these two now-successful Americans. They probably won’t be very happy when they learn I have published straight from their case files, and that’s exactly why I gave them 20 percent off my usual fee for signing a disclosure agreement!
Bob T. This man is a regional manager for a large American conglomerate of consumer retail brands. These are brand names you know. You’ve eaten way too much of their salty snack foods, you’ve wiped your ass with their toilet paper, and you’ve sure gotten a lot of their junk mail. In many ways, Bob, and people just like Bob, have made our economy what it is today. And, yes, Bob’s a sociopath. He’s twice divorced, thank God he doesn’t have any kids, and he has some serious sexual perversions. He suffers artery-bursting bouts of rage from years of workplace abuse. But we need to look on those as creative outbursts, not just paranoid episodes of lethal anger. And I’ve never met so human an animal. Bob is the living, breathing, very real essence of what you and I would be if we took some powerful drug that stripped away our ethical schema, empathy, and impulse control. We can learn a lot from Bob.
Judy G. is one crazy bitch. When she first came to me she was homeless. She’s still homeless, but now she’s rich, too – she doesn’t need a home, she just barges into the Hamptons estates of rich, successful people who are afraid of her, people who would kill for her interfacing ability and leveraging skills. When those acquaintances aren’t home, she hooks up with pretty much any living creature in the vicinity, and sleeps her way to the top of the local food chain. She doesn’t just sponge off rich, interesting people – she steals their ideas, saps their life force, and assumes their identities. When she has consumed or perverted the natural and intellectual resources in a local ecosystem, she moves on. She’s like some kind of horrible parasitic alien life-form that keeps spreading and can’t be stopped, not even with radiation. How does she do it and manage the East Coast’s top-grossing outcall escort service at the same time?
Read on…
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Meet Dr. Porker
Installment from "The Bowling Ball in the Freezer and Other Secrets of a Highly Efficient You." Copyright 2008, all rights reserved.
Hi, I’m Dr. Peter Porker! Welcome to my book! You may be resenting that $13.99 you paid for it. But you know what? Surprisingly little of it gets to me. You wouldn’t believe how many people take their cut along the way. And then there’s the garnishment order for the punitive damages from my book on do-it-yourself surgery.
But who am I, really?
My grandfather was Frederick Winslow Porker, a lesser known late 19th century proponent of scientific management, and practitioner of time-and-motion studies. He married this discipline to his interest in cultural anthropology. He attempted to apply efficiency theory to the development of the Gshwindi, a primitive nomadic people living in what is now Uganda. His goal was to create a race of hyperproductive supermen from the basically contented but embarrassingly backward Gshwindi. Unfortunately, this project resulted in the eventual enslavement and extermination of the Gshwindi by what is now the government of Uganda. Most of them were corralled, range-fed, and eaten by Idi Amin.
An amusing family story about F.W. Porker – a friend’s prank resulted in a brief commitment to a hospital for the criminally insane. Before the mistake was realized and his release effectuated, he narrowly escaped a lobotomy. Actually, the lobotomy was conducted, but it was botched.
As my own father’s profession consisted chiefly of periods of incarceration, I chose rather to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps when I began my career in executive consultancy. For a time, I attempted to revive and further my grandfather’s studies by measuring and evaluating human bathroom procedures. My research focused on methods to speed up human excretory and elimination activities: If humankind could save even a tiny fraction of the time we spend on the crapper and apply it instead to solving today’s pressing problems, think of what we could do for humanity! Unfortunately, the necessary observational studies have made me unwelcome at the community recreation center where I pursued my research. I now write, teach, consult, and stay out of the cold at the public library several blocks away.
In addition to efficiency studies, I have tried to apply behavioral psychology, especially the precepts of operant conditioning, to my work with clients. Borrowing from the psychologist B.F. Skinner, I invented the “Porker Box” in which business executives might be trained in appropriate workplace responses by providing pleasant and painful stimuli in response to choices they made while locked inside the enclosure. Before I tried using Porker Boxes on paying clients, I first experimented on infant orphans I obtained from Tijuana, whom I subsequently raised entirely in Porker Boxes. While to my mind it is still an open question whether the results have really contributed all that much to the increasing savagery of the Mexican drug cartels to whom many of my grown test subjects now belong, this claim has been fodder for various international extradition demands, and – you guessed it – more punitive damages.
Perhaps the challenges and setbacks in my professional life may themselves be instructive to you. When you happen to be incarcerated, and when the incarcerated life gives you lemons, what would you do? Do you simply throw the lemons at other inmates who are trying to rape you, or are you the kind of person who makes a mildly corrosive liquid from the juice, which might eventually eat through prison bars, allowing you to escape.
Next, let’s take a closer look at some of life’s lemons.
Hi, I’m Dr. Peter Porker! Welcome to my book! You may be resenting that $13.99 you paid for it. But you know what? Surprisingly little of it gets to me. You wouldn’t believe how many people take their cut along the way. And then there’s the garnishment order for the punitive damages from my book on do-it-yourself surgery.
But who am I, really?
My grandfather was Frederick Winslow Porker, a lesser known late 19th century proponent of scientific management, and practitioner of time-and-motion studies. He married this discipline to his interest in cultural anthropology. He attempted to apply efficiency theory to the development of the Gshwindi, a primitive nomadic people living in what is now Uganda. His goal was to create a race of hyperproductive supermen from the basically contented but embarrassingly backward Gshwindi. Unfortunately, this project resulted in the eventual enslavement and extermination of the Gshwindi by what is now the government of Uganda. Most of them were corralled, range-fed, and eaten by Idi Amin.
An amusing family story about F.W. Porker – a friend’s prank resulted in a brief commitment to a hospital for the criminally insane. Before the mistake was realized and his release effectuated, he narrowly escaped a lobotomy. Actually, the lobotomy was conducted, but it was botched.
As my own father’s profession consisted chiefly of periods of incarceration, I chose rather to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps when I began my career in executive consultancy. For a time, I attempted to revive and further my grandfather’s studies by measuring and evaluating human bathroom procedures. My research focused on methods to speed up human excretory and elimination activities: If humankind could save even a tiny fraction of the time we spend on the crapper and apply it instead to solving today’s pressing problems, think of what we could do for humanity! Unfortunately, the necessary observational studies have made me unwelcome at the community recreation center where I pursued my research. I now write, teach, consult, and stay out of the cold at the public library several blocks away.
In addition to efficiency studies, I have tried to apply behavioral psychology, especially the precepts of operant conditioning, to my work with clients. Borrowing from the psychologist B.F. Skinner, I invented the “Porker Box” in which business executives might be trained in appropriate workplace responses by providing pleasant and painful stimuli in response to choices they made while locked inside the enclosure. Before I tried using Porker Boxes on paying clients, I first experimented on infant orphans I obtained from Tijuana, whom I subsequently raised entirely in Porker Boxes. While to my mind it is still an open question whether the results have really contributed all that much to the increasing savagery of the Mexican drug cartels to whom many of my grown test subjects now belong, this claim has been fodder for various international extradition demands, and – you guessed it – more punitive damages.
Perhaps the challenges and setbacks in my professional life may themselves be instructive to you. When you happen to be incarcerated, and when the incarcerated life gives you lemons, what would you do? Do you simply throw the lemons at other inmates who are trying to rape you, or are you the kind of person who makes a mildly corrosive liquid from the juice, which might eventually eat through prison bars, allowing you to escape.
Next, let’s take a closer look at some of life’s lemons.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Subscribe To Dr. Porker's Irregular Feed
Posts
All Comments